Night and the City – Jules Dassin

Harry is an artist without an art …, that is something that could make a man very unhappy, …, groping for the right level, the means with which to express himself.

The best examples of film noir (Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon) rarely rely on the strength of their characters to achieve excellence. They succeed by bringing out the palpable fear in the dark corners of the urban landscape and by tying together these shadowy images into a taut narrative. Jules Dassin’s Night and the City achieves all of this but what separates it from the pack are the characters that populate the screen.

Unlike the glum, angsty but essentially morally upright protagonists (Sam Spade in the Maltese Falcon) we have Harry Fabian, a rogue, who is at once likeable and detestable. He is smart, ambitious and often “works as hard as 10 men”. But he is also an escapist, preferring to fly his way to the top rather than working through the trenches. The viewer constantly on an emotional tenterhook: is Harry to be pitied as a victim of circumstance or is his fate a result of his own misdemenours meriting no sympathy? Similarly, the archtypical vamp, Helen, is no longer a purely scheming woman; she just wants to scheme her way out of her suffering. And though she is indirectly responsible for the violent denouement, she cannot be squarely blamed.

While Night and the City breaks away from noir norms in characterization, it reinforces and enchances them in mis-en-scene and narrative style. Dassin films the alleys and streets of London at their shadowy best. In closeups, his camera exquisitely captures the expression of the most primeval of human instincts – the fight to survive. And though the narrative has its foggy bylanes, they all meet together in the end for the almost apocaplyptic ending. For in the world created by Dassin, redemption is not an option.

Night and the City is a directorial masterpiece and perfect example of how to tell a story on screen. It’s greatest success is to induce in the viewer’s mind a dichotomy of emotions for the onscreen characters drawing them further into the movie. A must watch for any serious movie buff.

Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell

First the good – Malcolm Gladwell is a kickass storyteller.

And now to the bad – he can, in all possibility, only tell stories without any substance. His new work Outliers suffers from the same problems that made Blink! a magnet for parodies (I personally love Blank?) and The Tipping Point seem like a ripoff (read Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Thomas Schelling instead). The basic argument he makes in Outliers can be effectively communicated in an essay of few pages and even that won’t be original.

In Outliers, Gladwell tries to break down the cult of genius; that people like Einstien, Mozart, Picasso just appear and succeed irrespective of their background and culture. He posits that chance – by the way of opportunities recieved, family background and cultural legacy – plays a much greater role in the success of these geniuses than one tends to imagine. I agree that, immediately off the head, this is not the way a lot of people think about these outliers. But once phrased, the statement does not require too much explanation: and definitely not a book with an explanation.

Common sense tells us that the opportunities a person gets in life are contingent on the social and financial standing of his parents. Further, even the most brilliant guy then has to put in a lot of effort in turning opportunity into something tangible. And to make it really great, the external world should be ready and primed for this opportunity. And lastly, if you are out to change status quo you will be better off coming from confrontionist culture rather than a passive one. In short, if Bill Gates parents weren’t rich, or he did not spend enough time programming in school, or the world was not ready for computers, or he did have a problem with confrontations, he would not be the richest man in the world.

Does this hypothesis surprise you? If it does, definitely read Outliers. If it does not but you have bought it, take it on your next long journey as a book thats reasonably interesting without being taxing. And finally if you haven’t bought it and are thinking about buying it, think again!

Crooked Little Vein – Warren Ellis

Certain works are meant to outrage the reader. Primarily it is done by the choice of subject matter or the language employed. At other times a disjoint narrative or a unnatural choice of characters do the trick. Warren Ellis is no stranger to this art and in Crooked Little Vein, his first novel, he employs all the above techniques to anger, frustrate, confound and befuddle the reader. This Ellis does, as in his earlier graphic novel Transmetropolitan, to bring out the dark underbelly of the modern society in starkest possible manner.

Ellis novel traces one particular assignment that out-of-work detective Mike McGill gets from the US secretary of state. The task is to trace down the alternate Constitution of the United States that was lost by an ex-president in a night of debauchery. He and Trix, the self-proclaimed expert on all things hidden and nasty, get down to the task of finding the lost book and in the process explore the worst nightmares of any “good society”. And in the process debunks the thesis that there can be a society for the free and the brave that is just and fair to everyone around – and any attempt to impose a moral framework will be twisted and force the human mind into depravities beyond normal human thought.

All of the above makes for excellent subversive material but not excellent literature. Crooked Little Vein apparently is apparently a sideways hat tip to Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs but it terms of its narrative comes nowhere close. The disjointedness in the plot is neither indicative of the characters mental state nor is it a function of the environ it is set in. Essentially a detective novel, the plot never arrests the readers attention through sheer whodunit drama. It seems Ellis’s prose suffers because of the lack of a visual element unlike in graphic novels where they fill in the gaps in the text.

In the end, Crooked Little Vein remains a short quick read that you will forget by the time the next book is finished. For a better introduction to Ellis’s work I would strongly recommend Transmetropolitan.